The twistor spinors of generic 2- and 3-distributions (Q532567)

In E.~Cartan's famous five-variables paper from 1910, it was shown that a generic distribution of rank two on a manifold of dimension five gives rise to a Cartan connection with values in the exceptional Lie algebra \(\mathfrak{g}_2\). Almost a century later, it was shown by P.~Nurowski that this Cartan connection actually induces a conformal structure of split signature \((2,3)\) on the given manifold. There is an analogous theory for generic rank three distributions in dimension \(6\), which is due to R.~Bryant. Both the generic distributions and the conformal structures in question are examples of parabolic geometries. In this language, the constructions are examples of so-called Fefferman-type constructions. This general approach leads to a characterization of the conformal structures obtained via the construction in terms of conformal holonomy as well as to a canonical decomposition of the space of conformal Killing fields. This was worked out in an earlier paper of the authors [SIGMA, Symmetry Integrability Geom. Methods Appl. 5, Paper 081 (2009; Zbl 1191.53016)]. In the article under review, the authors study these Fefferman type constructions in the language of spinors. First, it is observed that the conformal structures induced by orientable generic distributions are always canonically spin. Then, it is shown that the reduction of conformal holonomy can be nicely characterized equivalently as the existence of a twistor spinor of certain type. The distribution giving rise to the holonomy reduction as well as the resulting decompositions of conformal Killing vector fields are shown to admit very appealing explicit descriptions in terms of these twistor spinors.